Organizational Culture and Types

Culture is a deep rooted phenomenon in social systems. Culture and social environment distinguish human beings from other species (Skinner 1978)[1]. Culture in anthropology refers to socially trans­mitted patterns for behavior of a particular social group. Goldenough (in Kessing 1981) says that culture has been used to refer to the “regularly recurring pattern of life within a community”[2]. It can be inter­preted in terms of behavioral psychology as a sponta­neous gener­al­ization. It is said that an underlying difficulty in the study of culture is that we are not in the habit of analyzing cultural patterns; we are seldom even aware of them (Kessing 1981)[3]. It is similar to what Jung said under the concept of the collective unconscious. However, with some mental effort we can begin to become conscious of the codes that normally lie hidden beneath our everyday behavior. Similarly, Schein in relation to organizations defines culture as “taken-for-granted assump­tions”. So culture can be interpreted as internal­ized pattern of organiz­ational behavior. The older is the organ­iz­ation, the stronger is the culture.